We have really appreciated all of the great feedback from stations over the past couple of weeks about future opportunities to enhance American Archive metadata records, as well as possibilities of adding new records as new assets are created.

Today, we have one other request, which should only take a few minutes of your time.

During the AACIP project, stations created inventory records using the elements of the PBCore metadata schema. PBCore is a formalized way of describing audiovisual assets so that everyone is basically speaking the same language. PBCore was originally created as a way for public media stations to exchange information about assets among and within stations, but many organizations such as historical societies, public libraries, and independent producers have adopted PBCore to describe their video and audio assets.

Now, as part of the American Archive initiative, we have assembled a group of 42 awesome folks — from public media stakeholders to archivists and librarians — to help further develop PBCore, and to encourage its use among the AV community.

We encourage you to take the survey before Monday, May 5, but we will continue to accept responses indefinitely. If you take the survey before May 5, you can have a chance at winning a PBCore mug, which will feature our newly designed PBCore logo (above)! Who wouldn’t want a PBCore mug? We’ll announce the 3 winners on Friday, May 9th.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact WGBH’s Project Manager Casey Davis at casey_davis [at] wgbh [dot] org. And as always, many thanks for your continued support!

We’re posting this today on behalf of the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC). If you work at a radio or tv station and have audio digitization needs, please take a moment to complete their survey.

The Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) has received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to help address the issues identified in The Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Plan (2012) by exploring the possibility of adding audio preservation to NEDCC’s digitization services. We have developed a brief online survey to understand the needs of organizations like yours, and hope that you can take a few moments to complete it. It should take no longer than 10 – 15 minutes. The survey can be accessed here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/89RLNJM. It will close on Monday, April 14th.

Your opinion is very important to us and to the field. With your input, we will be able to make well-informed decisions about the services that collections-holding institutions need and want NEDCC to offer.

Thank you very much for your help, and if you have any questions please contact Jessica Bitely atjbitely@nedcc.org.

Today we published three new guides that will help staff at participating stations navigate the Archival Management System (AMS), view records in the AMS, and edit descriptions for digitized media. The guides include:

Using the AMS for the first time: this guide provides an overview of the functionality of the AMS and helps users navigate it to find the records they are looking for

Viewing records in the AMS: this guide describes the differences between the asset metadata and instantiation (copy) metadata and how to locate each type of information within a record

Editing records in the AMS: here you can find instructions for editing records, as well as suggestions and examples on how to enhance the descriptions of your stations’ digitized media

PBCore is back in action! As part of the American Archive initiative, WGBH in collaboration with the Library of Congress has been charged with further developing PBCore (Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary). The goals of the project are to:

Strategize direction for the PBCore schema

Improve the PBCore website

Solicit submissions from the public

Vote on submissions to improve PBCore

Develop resources and provide learning opportunities for organizations interested in using PBCore

Encourage and support the use of the standard

As the work progresses in the next few months, you’ll be seeing a lot of changes to the PBCore website and a lot of activity on the PBCore blog. So stay tuned for a new and improved website, schema, and a variety of new resources that will help your organization adopt and use PBCore!

The project is being coordinated the American Archive of Public Broadcasting project team. To form the PBCore Advisory Subcommittee, WGBH’s Project Manager Casey Davis reached out to public media stakeholders from universities, archives, and industry to assemble a group of 42 people, who will work in four groups:

WebsiteChair: Lauren Sorensen, Library of Congress
Jolene Beiser, Pacifica Radio Archives
Ashley Blewer, University of South Carolina
Nestor Cordova, University of Texas
Jeff Eastman, IMFRyan Edge, University of Illinois
Andrew Myers, WGBH
Alexander Papson, University of Notre Dame
Dave Rice, City University of New York
Deanna Ulvestad, Greene County Public LibraryAnne Wilkens, Wisconsin Public Television

There’s a lot of work to do, and we need your help to make this happen. We want to see PBCore in the wild. How do you use PBCore? What challenges do you have? Let us know in the comment section here or by email, and let’s make PBCore better together.

This post was written by Bailey Smith, Co-founder of PopUp Archive and PBCore Communications Team Secretary.

The American Archive team at WGBH is sincerely grateful to our intern Alyson Musser for all of the work she is accomplishing this semester. With the approval of several stations, we have started to add enhanced descriptions for digital files in the American Archive collection. Alyson is the first intern to be taking on this huge task, and her work will be extremely helpful to users seeking to discover materials when the collection is made available.

Hello, my name is Alyson Musser and I am an intern here at WGBH for the American Archive. I am currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from Simmons College, with a concentration in Archives Management. I have a B.A. in History from Cornell University, and I am a huge fan of Downton Abbey.

American Archive Intern Alyson Musser

As an intern, I have been going through the digitized materials in the AMS and adding descriptive information to the records. So far, the most exciting part of working with the American Archive has been the chance to see some of my favorite historical figures in action. These include, but are not limited to: Eleanor Roosevelt, Julia Child, Dwight Eisenhower, Peter Jennings and John F. Kennedy.

In the 1960’s Eleanor Roosevelt hosted the series “Prospects of Mankind,” which aired on WGBH. The series featured Eleanor hosting panel discussions on pertinent issues of the day. In this episode, Eleanor travelled to the White House to discuss the status of women with JFK.

The American Archive also includes more recent television footage, such as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s speech at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Law, aired by Illinois Public Media (WILL) in 1994. In the speech, Justice Ginsberg blends her insight and wit to trace the history of U.S. legal education. Similar to JFK above, she also discusses the importance of promoting gender equality.

I am looking forward to spending more time with the American Archive collection, and finding more public history treasures to share.

As the host of WGBH Journal, Bill Cavness, put it 36 years ago, “Today is not just St. Patrick’s Day. In Boston, schools, banks and other public offices are closed because it is Evacuation Day. Evacuation Day commemorates the final departure of the British from Boston in 1776 during the American Revolutionary War.”

Have a listen to this clip found in the American Archive for Public Broadcasting and learn about why the British troops left Boston and how Evacuation Day became a holiday.

On February 10, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting hosted an event celebrating the American Archive, which took place in the marvelous Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress. The ceremony featured speeches by CPB’s President and CEO Patricia Harrison, Librarian of Congress Dr. James Billington, WGBH’s President and CEO Jon Abbott, and Senator Ed Markey. Check out CPB’s photo gallery of the event on their Facebook page: http://ow.ly/uu80k. Earlier that day, the American Archive teams from WGBH and the Library of Congress met in a day-long meeting to discuss our progress on the current project as well as plans for moving forward.

Over the past couple of months, the American Archive team has collaborated with Senior Associate Editor of The Atlantic Becca Rosen (@beccarosen) on a series of online articles spotlighting the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, which launched in conjunction with the American Archive ceremony.

I am thrilled to have the opportunity to help the American Archive of Public Broadcasting because I believe wholeheartedly in its mission to preserve American public radio and television programming and make it available for years to come.

My exposure to public television parallels my earliest childhood memories. I grew up in New Jersey, but every summer I would spend a few weeks of my school vacation with my grandparents in New Hampshire. Among the highlights of those visits were the days I spent on my great-grandparents farm. My great-grandmother, Nan, was a terrific baker, painter and keen observer of nature. We would spend hours looking through our magnifying glasses at insects or walking the old stone walls in her apple orchard, but when it was time for the Macneil/Lehrer Report (and later the Macneil/Lehrer Newshour) we dropped what we were doing and went inside. Nan would “fix” me a glass of Tang and we’d watch the news together. She would do her best to explain what the stories were about, and without fail she would praise the show’s format because they spent “more time on the stories that matter” and “don’t waste our time with those infernal ads!” For me, if Nan liked it, I liked it too.

It wasn’t until after I graduated from Monmouth College with a dual degree in History and Education that I got hooked on NPR. My first job after college was as a cataloger at the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (now the USC Shoah Foundation). The Shoah Foundation collected over 50,000 videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors. The cataloging staff was tasked with watching the interviews, adding time codes that marked the start and end points of subject-based segments, applying “keywords” from a controlled vocabulary of descriptive terms and summarizing each segment as well as the entire testimony. It was pretty heady stuff and pretty heavy content. This is when the seed of becoming an archivist was planted for me, and it was during my commute to and from work on the parched freeways of Los Angeles that I discovered the vibrant and informative programing of NPR over the airwaves of KCRW and KPCC.

NPR programs like Morning Edition, All Things Considered, On Point, On The Media, The World, Science Friday, and Marketplace as well as PBS shows such as The Newshour, Frontline, Nova, The American Experience, Charlie Rose and Tavis Smiley have been the lens through which I have learned about and reflected upon the major events of my adult life.

Public broadcasting is also one of the places I go to first for entertainment. Shows like Austin City Limits, Nature, This Old House and Masterpiece on PBS as well as Morning Becomes Eclectic, Car Talk, This American Life, The Vinyl Café (CBC show) and A Celtic Sojourn on NPR keep me laughing and tapping my toes.

So, although you wouldn’t know it by the amount I contribute during pledge drives (blush), I am an unabashed zealot for public broadcasting. I am that seemingly strange guy with a grin and a faraway look sitting in his car in the grocery store parking lot (I’m probably trying to catch all of the unofficial sponsors of Car Talk. “Ornithology Expert, Luke A. Boyd. Figure Skating Coach, Landon McKeaster. Air Traffic Controller, Ulanda U. Lucky.” I love those!). I am also soon to be an archivist who recognizes that the programs public broadcasting has created over the past 60 years are an invaluable historical record that must be preserved.

As an intern I will help develop description guidelines that will help future interns navigate the AMS and PBCore metadata, create examples of the PBCore elements that will help users understand how to implement the metadata standard, ingest new material into the AMS and help develop guidelines for stations who are contributing material and write blog posts featuring highlights from the AAPB collection.

I look forward to working with you all. See you again in future blog posts!

Bill Nehring
Master’s Candidate, Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science
American Archive of Public Broadcasting Intern, Spring 2014